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Adcock’s divorce, or frontier girls gone wild

Stephanie Koroll has been working feverishly, down at the archives, sorting through old court documents. Stephanie is a delicate and sensitive young lady, so everyone took notice when she blushed bright red, clutched at her throat and uttered, “Oh my!” She was reading from the spidery script of a yellowed bit of parchment from 1849. It was a petition for divorce of one Jesse Adcock, an unlucky and much abused lad. Five years earlier he had married the saucy young firecracker, Mary Jane Vandyke, down in Hardin County. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but young Adcock’s dream of taking a tiger to his bed had soured. Nearly fainting, Stephanie fanned herself with the document as we all gathered around to support her.

The text of the document asserts that, “they had lived together for a short time on good terms – but that they had not been married but a few months before she willfully and without any cause whatever absented herself from your petitioner.” It appears that young Jesse had married not a tiger, but rather a stray cat. It goes on, “Your petitioner would bear with her desertions and would time and again persuade and induce her to return again to his home and society. All this he submitted to with as much patience and forbearance as possible – until he found that she had so far forgotten her duty as a wife and the proprieties of life as to visit a house of ill fame.” If that is not bad enough, young Jesse continues, “Your petitioner believes for the purpose of having criminal intercourse with other men.”

At this point in the reading we all had to stop and fan ourselves. There was, however, no relief in sight as the accusations became ever worse. Jesse relates, “On one occasion, your petitioner had followed her to one of those haunts of iniquity – found her fastened up in a private apartment.” Why was she locked away, you ask? The report continues, “In endeavoring to rescue her and take her home again – he had to encounter two armed men who resisted his influence and who your petitioner believes had her there for their own private use and benefit.” At this point you don’t have to wonder if they had Mary Jane locked up to iron their shirts.

Jesse Adcock had finally seen enough. He asserts, “Your petitioner was so enraged at this her strange, illegal and unnatural course – that he resolved to live with her no longer.” While he might have disavowed her, he was still apparently interested in her shenanigans, to wit, “your petitioner has seen her in the dead hours of the night, traveling the public highways,” (wait for it) “dressed in men’s attire, with others of both sexes of reputed easy virtue.” In addition to Mary Jane’s other “talents,” she was also a cross-dresser. You can scoff at this, but in those days it was a very serious charge. The roles of men and women were strenuously observed and defined, and the act of cross-dressing was considered an act of criminal impersonation – for either sex.

Jesse Adcock adds more instances of his wife’s philandering, such as “caught in the act of adulterous intercourse with other men,” and “she has been indicted and imprisoned in the public jail, and probably convicted for open and notorious lewdness.” He follows these accusations with typical assurances of his own upstanding conduct, such as “he has faithfully observed his marriage vow,” and, “has faithfully endeavored to perform his several duties as husband – as long as they resided together.”

According to his testimony, he was a model husband.

In light of the foregoing he asks the court, “that the bonds of matrimony heretofore existing between them be forever dissolved.” Under the circumstances there is little doubt that the court would have granted him a divorce – a rare event in early America. Before 1831 a divorce could only be granted by the state legislature, which meant airing one’s dirty laundry before the entire state. Most unhappy couples chose to remain in a loveless or abusive relationship rather than to have everyone know the intimate details of their sham marriage.

After 1831 divorce proceedings were carried out in Circuit, or sometimes Chancery court. Poor Jesse would have been held up to public ridicule, even though he was, apparently, not entirely at fault. We hear no more of Jesse Adcock or his estranged wife, Mary Jane Vandyke Adcock. The frontier had the strange ability to erase a person’s past. You could change your name, move to another area, and come out as white as snow. This fact has caused many genealogical researchers to get ulcers as they search for family who seem to have magically “disappeared” from the records. They often had not disappeared, but rather they “erased” themselves and their past.